In this white paper we discuss two of the new features in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features).
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Don Schlichting examines several SQL Server 2008 grouping functions including GROUP BY, GROUPING SETS, CUBE, and ROLLUP. In addition, he demonstrates how to use SUM and COUNT in a WHERE clause after rows have been grouped.
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